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Everlasting Joy

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 4, 1875

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 45, No. 10.

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Everlasting Joy.

By A. K. Clark

How vast the distinction between earthly and heavenly joy. One is temporal; the other, eternal. One can never satisfy; the other will be the fullness of delight to the saints forever and ever.
“The pleasures of earth we can see fade away, / They bloom for a season, but soon they decay.”
Not so with the pleasures in store for the child of God. His pleasures here are interwoven with pain and sorrow, yet every sad occurrence shall be forgotten, and all tears wiped away in the day when Christ shall make up his jewels.
Sorrow and sighing then are exchanged for gladness that is eternal. The ransomed of the Lord shall be delivered from a sorrowing world to a joyful Zion; from mortality to immortality; from a world of hate to a world of love. There the songs of joy shall never end. There no evil shall enter; for none but those who have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, shall be there; nothing that defileth or maketh a lie. Oh! what glory. Oh! what joy. Reader, do you not desire to be a partaker thereof?
Are you not willing to let the perishing things of this earth go from your grasp, that you may obtain a more enduring substance? Can you conceive anything in the world that is worthy of a comparison with everlasting joy? Worldly joys give no solid, abiding peace. Why, then, seek their charms? There is yet room in the fold, and the good Shepherd will kindly watch over and care for you. There you may rest in peace without fear. There is joy not to be purchased with money. It is obtained by a pure heart and clear conscience before God.
Then seek the Lord without delay, and make sure of the glory that is soon to dawn upon the righteous. Let us act the good part in the life which now is, that we may share in the life which is to come. For soon, as Isaiah declares, the dead men shall live again; they that dwell in the dust will awake and sing; for their dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out her dead. “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert; and an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called, The way of holiness; the redeemed shall walk there; and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” Isa. 35: 5-10.
Let us walk in the light as he is in the light, that we may have fellowship one with another, be cleansed from all sin, and be ready for the coming of our Lord.
A. K. CLARK.
Fairfield, Maine.